Survey on Coverage Path Planning with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Coverage path planning consists of finding the route which covers every point of a certain area of interest. In recent times, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been employed in several application domains involving terrain coverage, such as surveillance, smart farming, photogrammetry, disaster ma...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Cabreira, Tauã M., Brisolara, Lisane Brisolara de, Ferreira Júnior, Paulo Roberto
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2019
Country:Brasil
Institution:Universidade Federal de Pelotas (UFPEL)
Repository:Repositório Institucional da UFPel - Guaiaca
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:guaiaca.ufpel.edu.br:prefix/15867
Online Access:http://guaiaca.ufpel.edu.br/xmlui/handle/prefix/15867
https://doi.org/10.3390/drones3010004
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Unmanned aerial vehicles
Coverage path planning
Terrain coverage
Exact cellular decomposition
Approximate cellular decomposition
Description
Summary:Coverage path planning consists of finding the route which covers every point of a certain area of interest. In recent times, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been employed in several application domains involving terrain coverage, such as surveillance, smart farming, photogrammetry, disaster management, civil security, and wildfire tracking, among others. This paper aims to explore and analyze the existing studies in the literature related to the different approaches employed in coverage path planning problems, especially those using UAVs. We address simple geometric flight patterns and more complex grid-based solutions considering full and partial information about the area of interest. The surveyed coverage approaches are classified according to a classical taxonomy, such as no decomposition, exact cellular decomposition, and approximate cellular decomposition. This review also contemplates different shapes of the area of interest, such as rectangular, concave and convex polygons. The performance metrics usually applied to evaluate the success of the coverage missions are also presented.